pokeplatinum

Bugs and Glitches

These are known bugs and glitches in the original Pokémon Platinum game: code that clearly does not work as intended or that only works in limited circumstances but has the possibility to fail or crash.

Fixes are written in the diff format. If you’ve used Git before, this should look familiar:

this is some code
- delete red - lines
+ add green + lines

Contents

• Battle Engine
  • Acid Rain
  • Fire Fang Always Bypasses Wonder Guard
  • Post-KO Switch-In AI Scoring Overflow
• Wild Encounters
  • Fishing Encounters ignore Sticky Hold and Suction Cups

Battle Engine

Acid Rain

“Acid Rain” is the colloquial name of an in-battle glitch in Pokémon Platinum, Heart Gold, and Soul Silver which results in the simultaneous occurrence of multiple forms of field effects, including multiple instances of weather-based damage and end-of-turn Ability effects. It is triggered under the following conditions:

1. One or more of any weather effect (aside from heavy rain), Trick Room, Gravity, or Uproar is in effect.
2. The host player of the battle (or, for in-game battles, the player) uses Pursuit.
3. The target of Pursuit is attempting to switch out on that turn and faints.

Detailed Technical Description

The root cause of this bug is a parameter swap in the vanilla bytecode script for Pursuit which subtracts the fainted battler's ID from the field conditions bitmask, rather than setting the fainted battler variable to that ID. To illustrate, suppose that the field condition is set to permanent Hail due to a previous activation of Snow Warning. This is represented in the field-condition bitmask as `0x80`. At a point after this, our opponent is fainted by Pursuit while attempting to switch out, setting `BTLVAR_SCRIPT_TEMP` to `1`. Then, the following line of the bytecode is executed: ``` - UpdateVarFromVar OPCODE_SUB_TO_ZERO, BTLVAR_FIELD_CONDITIONS, BTLVAR_SCRIPT_TEMP ```` This instruction subtracts the value of `BTLVAR_SCRIPT_TEMP` (1) from the value of `BTLVAR_FIELD_CONDITIONS` (`0x80`) and stores the result (`0x7F`) back into `BTLVAR_FIELD_CONDITIONS`. This value represents the 7 least-significant bits being flipped to `1`, which denotes in-game that all of the following weathers are active: 1. Hail (temporary) 2. Sun (temporary and permanent) 3. Sand (temporary and permanent) 4. Rain (temporary and permanent) Because the turn counter for temporary weather was never initialized, temporary weather states are functionally permanent. The visible result is that each of these weather states is active at once and that all effects related to them also trigger.

Fix: Edit res/battle/res/scripts/subscript_pursuit.s

     UpdateVar OPCODE_ADD, BTLVAR_FAINTED_MON, BATTLER_ENEMY_SLOT_1
     UpdateVar OPCODE_RIGHT_SHIFT, BTLVAR_CALC_TEMP, 0x00000001
     CompareVarToValue OPCODE_NEQ, BTLVAR_CALC_TEMP, 0x00000000, _208
-    // BUG: Acid Rain (see docs/bugs_and_glitches.md)
-    UpdateVarFromVar OPCODE_SUB_TO_ZERO, BTLVAR_FIELD_CONDITIONS, BTLVAR_SCRIPT_TEMP
+    UpdateVarFromVar OPCODE_SET, BTLVAR_FAINTED_MON, BTLVAR_SCRIPT_TEMP
     Call BATTLE_SUBSCRIPT_POP_ATTACKER_AND_DEFENDER
     UpdateVarFromVar OPCODE_GET, BTLVAR_MOVE_TEMP, BTLVAR_CURRENT_MOVE

Fire Fang Always Bypasses Wonder Guard

The routine MoveIsOnDamagingTurn in src/battle/battle_lib.c is used only by checks related to the ability Wonder Guard. The purpose of this routine in isolation is to determine if a two-stage move is on its damaging turn; functionally, this permits the execution of such moves while a Pokémon with Wonder Guard is on the field, even if the second turn would deal no damage.

The effect for Fire Fang – which is off-by-one from the effect for Shadow Force – was mistakenly included in this routine.

Fix: Edit the routine MoveIsOnDamagingTurn in src/battle/battle_lib.c:

static BOOL MoveIsOnDamagingTurn(BattleContext *battleCtx, int move)
{
    switch (MOVE_DATA(move).effect) {
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_BIDE:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_CHARGE_TURN_HIGH_CRIT:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_CHARGE_TURN_HIGH_CRIT_FLINCH:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_CHARGE_TURN_DEF_UP:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_SKIP_CHARGE_TURN_IN_SUN:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_FLY:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_DIVE:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_DIG:
    case BATTLE_EFFECT_BOUNCE:
-    case BATTLE_EFFECT_FLINCH_BURN_HIT: // BUG: Fire Fang Always Bypasses Wonder Guard (see docs/bugs_and_glitches.md)
+    case BATTLE_EFFECT_SHADOW_FORCE:
        return battleCtx->battleStatusMask & SYSCTL_LAST_OF_MULTI_TURN;
        break;
    }

    return TRUE;
}

Post-KO Switch-In AI Scoring Overflow

During score-evaluation for party members to replace a fainted Pokémon, the trainer AI can generate scores sufficiently high that will exceed the upper bound of its scoring memory. This results in incorrect party members being chosen as replacement battlers.

This bug can apply in each stage of score-evaluation; it is most notable in its evaluation of stage 1, where the AI will treat a quad-effective match-up – for example, a Machamp (Fighting+Fighting) vs. a Bastiodon (Rock+Steel) – as having a score equivalent to 65 rather than 320.

Fix: Edit the routine BattleAI_PostKOSwitchIn in src/battle/battle_lib.c:

-    u8 score, maxScore;
+    u32 score, maxScore;

Wild Encounters

Fishing Encounters ignore Sticky Hold and Suction Cups

When calculating the encounter rate for fishing encounters the abilities Sticky Hold and Suction Cups are supposed to double the encounter rate. However, due to a typo, the encounter rate stays unmodified.

Fix: Edit the routine ov6_0224226C in src/overlay006/ov6_02240C9C.c

-                v0 * 2; // BUG: Abilities do not Increase Fishing Encounter Rate (see docs/bugs_and_glitches.md)
+                v0 *= 2;